Comments on: Beware Heritable Beliefs

By: Quick Links - In The Agora

Quick Links - In The Agora — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:29:11 +0000

[...] of your beliefs are heritable: “Genetic differences explained most of differences in attitudes to life and equality (66% [...]

By: In the Agora

In the Agora — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 12:56:37 +0000

Quick Links

Here are some pieces so interesting I’m at a loss for further commentary:Insurers are starting to account for the costs of global climate change.The two-dollar bill is making a big comeback.Barak Obama is the real deal. Click and listen why.Some…

By: Half Sigma

Half Sigma — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:43:04 +0000

Why we believe what we believe

I found a comment on someone else’s blog which I thought was pretty interesting. The post was about how a study of identical twins showed that some political and social attitudes had a high degree of hereditability. The commenter, who

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 02:50:42 +0000

Seems like there are two questions here. The first is, is there any reason to believe that genetically-determined beliefs on a given topic are likely to be correct? In other words, if our genes largely determine our beliefs on abortion, is there a plausible mechanism whereby selection effects would tend to amplify genes which lead to “correct” beliefs in that area? It’s hard to credit that this is the case, because abortion is such a specific question and probably not one which has been relevant for survival far back into history. So we would not have very good grounds to conclude that our beliefs in this area are correct. They are more likely to be what Gould called a “spandrel”, an accidental byproduct of genes which were selected for other purposes.

The second question arises for genes where we can in fact come up with a plausible story along these lines. Consider for example attitudes towards fire. Fire has been around for a long time, it is dangerous and powerful, so it might be plausible that there is effective selection for genes which affect attitudes and behavior towards fire. Therefore a priori one might assume that his own attitudes towards fire are “correct” even if genetically determined. However, suppose one then discovers that his own attitudes towards fire are very different from those of society as a whole. Wouldn’t it then be reasonable to conclude that it is more likely that society’s attitudes are the correct ones, and that ones own attitudes are due to some genetic mistake or malfunction, since members of society have been subject to the same genetic selection pressures but are far more numerous than onesself?

Therefore it seems that whether or not one can come up with a mechanism for how a genetically based belief can be reasonably attributed to selection pressure and presumed to be correct, either way you can’t justify ignoring the social consensus in favor of your genetically-determined belief.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:05:07 +0000

Michael, your first two questions are interesting; I hope they will be answered someday. A net zero correlation could result from several non-zero correlated influence pathways that cancel each other.

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 12:36:02 +0000

What beliefs are correlated with the belief in the result of this study?

With the propensity to debias beliefs?

What reference classes should be used?

By the way, 0% genetic influence on attitudes towards intellect/books/chess/etc strikes me as Radically unlikely given genetic influences on IQ and on five factor “openness”, the latter of which correlates at least .3 with IQ and basically *is* attitude towards intellect/books/chess/etc.

Lots of data suggests the religious belief is negatively g loaded.
g loading may sometimes be difficult to define simply if relationships are non-linear, so g-type effects may be more pervasive than typically stated.

By: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:37:00 +0000

Making fine distinctions in understanding hereditability of attitudes

Tyler Cowen points to Robin Hansen who points to this paper by Olson, Vernon, Harris, and Jang, “The heritability of attitudes: a study of twins”. Robin writes, summarizing the paper, your differing attitudes on abortion, birth control, immigrants, gen…

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 20:13:10 +0000

John, thanks for noticing; I corrected “twins” to “twin pairs.”

By: John Jenkins

John Jenkins — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 18:39:20 +0000

asked 339 twins for their attitudes on 30 topics.

Where does that number come from? It can’t be right (it’s odd) and the paper says 672 (336 pairs) on p. 848.

By: Andrew Edwards

Andrew Edwards — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:14:26 +0000

“The subject here is your random deviation from that genetic average. And the suggestion is to estimate and repudiate that random component of your beliefs, rather than to repudiate all components of your belief.”

Hmm. I was thinking that the idea was that we should recognize that many of our beliefs are held for reasons other than their truth-quality. For instance, they may be held for genetic reasons, social reasons, or ego reasons. This should cause us to re-examine our beliefs and be sure that we’re testing them on truthfulness, rather than on intuition.

In other words, I don’t know why I would necessarily accept as true a belief that was consistent with the genetic average. Even average genetics, cleaned for random variations from the norm, could cause wrong beliefs.

As Nietzsche put it, there are certain assumptions without which our lives would be unliveable. But this does not mean that those assumptions are true. The conditions of life, in his words, could contain error.